Retired federal attorney Jeffrey Moffatt, who I believe was wrongly disbarred by the State Bar of Arizona because he and his wife were both Republican candidates for office, is now undergoing weaponized lawfare by rogue California federal prosecutors eager for their pound of flesh, too. However, the Phoenix Metro chapter of Reverend Al Sharpton’s powerful National Action Network (NAN) is coming to Moffatt’s defense and demanding that the “unjust and disparate treatment” stop.
“As a national civil rights organization committed to the principles of justice and equal treatment under the law, NAN has initiated discussions with the Arizona State Bar to address these concerns,” Phoenix NAN said in a letter sent to the U.S. District Court in Los Angeles. “We are actively engaged in dialogue to ensure that Mr. Moffatt receives a fair and impartial process, and to advocate against any discriminatory or retaliatory practices that may be at play.”
NAN explained further, “It is our position that Mr. Moffatt is being mistreated in a manner inconsistent with how similar cases have been handled in the past. This raises serious questions of equity, transparency, and the consistent application of legal and ethical standards.”
The group is also demanding that the State Bar of Arizona end its lawfare against several Arizona attorneys, including me, due to discrimination based on race and other categories.
Moffatt was disbarred over an exchange between him and a woman on Facebook who had asked him about potential legal services. She claimed she could not pay the consultation fee, so he joked that she could send him a nude photo.
The State Bar of Arizona’s disciplinary judge disbarred him, even though he had barely practiced law in Arizona, and even though the joking conversation never went any further, she never retained him. The bar sleazily implicated him with an ethics rule for criminal convictions, even though he’d never been convicted of a crime, which would have been past the one-year statute of limitations anyway.
The Moffatts told me that a detective had 3rd degree felony charges filed against the woman and her boyfriend for extortion, and the pair confessed on tape, with the boyfriend taking responsibility. Due to law enforcement allegedly claiming they lost the tapes, the charges were dropped. The detective told the Moffatts in an email to send him any additional communications with the woman, “and I will be able to complete additional charges.”
In contrast, other attorneys who have done far worse, such as extensive sexual misbehavior with others they worked with, weren’t even disbarred, likely due to their tight connections with the bar. The Moffatts maintain that the bar targeted him because he ran for Congress in California as a Republican, and his wife, Star, who is black, ran for the California State Legislature as a Republican.
California prosecutors came after Moffatt merely because he checked the wrong box on a form. For years, he filled out routine paperwork as a representative for people seeking benefits from the Social Security Administration’s Supplemental Security Income program — lengthy forms which include one line asking whether he was an attorney. He does not need to be an attorney to hold that position; it makes zero difference for that job. He’d filled out the same form for years in that position. However, because he checked "yes"—not used to checking "no," since he’d just been disbarred—he was charged with the felony of Falsifying, Concealing, and Covering a Material Fact by Trick, Scheme, and Device.
Dishonestly, nowhere in the indictment did it admit that Moffatt did not need to be an attorney to serve in that position. That is how prosecutors were able to convince a grand jury to indict him.
The Social Security Administration’s page “Your Right to Representation” clearly states, “You can have a representative help you when you do business with Social Security. Your representative can be an attorney or a non-attorney. We will work with your representative, just as we would with you.” There is nothing on the page that states that an attorney can do things that a non-attorney cannot.
Interestingly, the indictment acknowledged that the grounds for disbarment were vague and broad, citing “honesty” — the type of ethics rule now typically used to target conservative attorneys.
ANY type of action that at first glance appears possibly negative could fall into that category. This is how the left disbarred conservative election attorneys, stating that filing lawsuits challenging election corruption — which lost due to corrupt judges — reflected poorly on their fitness as lawyers.
Despite the fact that Moffatt has a severe Traumatic Brain Injury, brain tumor, and cysts forming inside his brain, needing surgery, the treatment he’s received in court has been appalling. He is not allowed to appear remotely, and the judge recently ordered him to represent himself pro se. Without any grounds, the judge recently threatened him — despite the fact that Moffatt has dutifully filed hundreds of pages of pleadings — with arrest if he didn’t show up at the next hearing.
His wife, Star, who has been married to him for 35 years, has attempted to represent him as a Disability Advocate, but her efforts have gone mostly ignored. Instead, he has had multiple public defenders who failed to file a single pretrial motion in his case, setting it up for certain failure as he's unable to participate in the necessary proceedings before trial.
The Moffatts believe one way to reform corrupt state bars is to eliminate the corrupt administrative judges assigned to attorney discipline cases. The Trump administration is attempting to remove similar judges from executive agencies. Moffatt was disbarred by former Disciplinary Judge William O’Neil, who stacked his disciplinary panels with a neighbor and allowed a trustee handling his property to continue practicing law in prison after a DUI accident that killed someone.
Hope may be on the horizon. President Donald Trump appointed former interim U.S. Attorney for D.C. Ed Martin as Weaponization Czar. Martin will be looking into injustice in the legal system, and has indicated that it may likely include state bars.